Best posts made by bored

@thenomain I'm not sure what's unclear.

To me, her post reads like the 'There is no controversy' line, in that her denial (via admonishment/conspicuous condemnation) is far more suspicious than total silence.

"Penis Man is neither man nor woman, you nor me," Shomer wrote in one post. "We are ALL Penis Man."

Amen.

@thenomain I mean, damaging only on the scale of any of this shit being anything which anyone takes remotely seriously, which is a... very low scale, yes. In the grand scheme, I think the post is more useless than harmful, but once more, if we're going to have 'active mods' (which I categorically object to as a major and harmful shift in the board culture) they need to post better than 'useless at best.'

@mietze said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@bored but any moderator clearly has the authority to speak as a mod. I mean that is absolutely crystal clear, even when there is not consensus.

But make comments? That’s already clearly part of the perks, no overstepping authority.

I guess this is the issue. I don't think there should be 'perks.' Their only function should be helping @Arkandel with what was supposedly too large of a workload in his original job, which was holding people to actual (hopefully posted) rules. They are volunteering to do something thankless, not superusers with 'privileges.'

I kind of want to watch it, but I've never gotten into (most of) the CW stuff and everything everyone says about Arrow makes me hesitant to attempt slogging through it.

That said, even just from seeing trailers/ads, I was really impressed that they made a comics-accurate looking Monitor on television, of all things, and actually worked in more else-verse material in than the original had (making this a bit like CoIE + Multiversity).

@thenomain said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@bored said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@thenomain I mean, damaging only on the scale of any of this shit being anything which anyone takes remotely seriously, which is a... very low scale, yes.

And yet, here we are.

if we're going to have 'active mods' (which I categorically object to as a major and harmful shift in the board culture) they need to post better than 'useless at best.'

So your summary of Auspice is 'useless at best'. Which means that you think her average is 'below useless', with no more evidence than "it looks bad if you don't trust them to begin with".

No, sorry. My 'useless at best' is for the quality of that post alone. IE you can scale it from 'not harmful but literally accomplishes nothing because the people who are accusing these things won't read it or care' (ie, useless) to 'maybe slightly harmful because its an official post that looks like spin/denial, and... I dunno, maybe someone who didn't know about MSB could get pointed at it by an angry staffer and believe them' (ie, fractionally negative).

Overall, I think we have two examples of @Auspice modding poorly. Based on this, if they want active mods, I think she's a bad choice so far. But I don't actually want active mods, and as a purely mechanical/workload mod I would have no particular issue.

It's worth pointing out that the %'s are very guesswork-y and vary considerably between reporting institution, so hanging on single % changes is not particularly meaningful (apparently people were accusing my governor of conspiracy theory-esque minimizing the threat because he quoted a lower %, but it was simply from a different source). These are also likely to be higher than the actual mortality rate, because people who are mildly or non-symptomatic account for the bulk of cases yet rarely make it into the statistics at all.

They are valuable in a comparative sense because other illnesses are measured the same way, with the same flaws, and these %s are an order of magnitude higher than typical flu mortality.

Double sorry

@wolfs said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Some of this reads more like people who have a personal problem with Auspice just looking for an excuse to gripe,

FWIW, I don't believe I have any particular history with her. Like @tempest, my focusing on her is because... she's the mod who's been fucking up. It really is that simple.

or some people just being against any form of visible moderation whatsoever.

This is closer to it. I'm not against any moderation, but I believe we were sold a rules-centric form of moderation but are instead getting mods (or at least, one of them) who are mod-voicing their opinions/ideas/etc. Do not want.

@surreality said in Good TV:

@Aria said in Good TV:

there's still, like, five or six books worth of material to cover

...how is his name not Job already

hahahaha

I binged through whatever seasons were on prior to this last one a while ago, so obviously it hooked me enough to keep me watching, but definitely in a sort of 'this is so bad its amazing' sense at times. How many times can you do 'Uhtred literally saves your entire fucking Kingdom' -> 'Uhtred makes some small social gaff' -> 'UHTRED IS A VILLAINOUS HEATHEN AND BANISHED'? HOW MANY?

(Runner up: how many times can you hand him a random new love interest and then kill/otherwise remove her? that fridge must be getting crowded)

@arkandel said in Regarding administration on MSB:

And I do want some of the targeted group actions ("we don't like you in particular, person, so everything you say will be attacked on sight!") to stop. Dogpiling is definitely on my radar as well.

Do you think that's what this is? How would, exactly, negative mod behavior (or, alternately, shitty normal poster behavior) even be addressed under that rubric? Discount this case if you like, there was quite a bit more consensus on the first time around being a screw-up. How do you that consensus if multiple people can't express that they disagree with the action?

My order is something like DD1 > JJ > DD2 > LC (first half)/IF > LC (second half, because killing your superbly acted interesting villain to replace with a loony toon is dumb).

But I'll agree that my biggest gripe with IF was that the fight choreography wasn't as good as it could have been for the martial arts focused entry. And yeah it probably wasn't all Finn's fault. Stunt people are a thing, you can make it work, but there was just so much weird, lame stuff, drawn out fights with single mooks, etc. I liked the tournament well enough, since those characters have a legit basis to be giving him trouble. Ultimately its hard not to be let down when DD set a ridiculously high standard, as one of the best choreographed things on TV ever, even with season 2 occasionally looking like the TMNT movies (and no, I don't mind TMNT-ish ninjas, with the obvious connection between the two, but the big rooftop fight was vague and a little silly compared to the brutal hallway and stairway masterworks).

Best thing in IF was definitely the Meachums, who really acted circles around everyone else and just had more character depth going on, although I disliked the easy role flip at the end.

@deadculture Its too long to remember it all, so I could be wrong, but I think, despite Cirno leading it, there was a non-zero number of people supporting him in the thread vs everyone telling him to shut up (which was the correct response) so... even there, you kind of saw people being very willing to jump on 'omg racism!', even when it was clearly unjustified.

@sunny Sure. I'd still say there's a larger shift because even where places may not have this rule, I do think you see staff being a lot more aware or reactive to it. Not every game puts its cultural norms into news files.

@deadculture

I went back and found the thread. Hilariously, the first post it went to was me downvoted to -2 for calling Cirno a troll and @Arkandel upvoted to 5 telling me 'just because he's a troll, doesn't mean he's wrong.'

So yeah, SJW MSB was in general largely supportive of Cirno's unfounded banshee wailing about nonexistent racism.

@sunny said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

Many of these historical games are set in time periods where there's no indoor plumbing, rampant disease, people not bathing, water and food that could possibly kill you, no reliable birth control, women dying in childbirth all over the place, etc.. The world during these time periods was not actually enjoyable or fun. A lot of these things tend to be glossed over for historical settings, realism be damned, because this part isn't fun for anybody playing in it.

Give Firan some credit, yo. It had lack of birth control and women dying in childbirth alongside the vicious racism, IC/OOC homophobia, and state-sponsored rape. Plus I think there was a disease tp once.

@rebekahse said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

(It was probably Firan, AKA "the best argument in the world for the idea that people are willing to play characters in games that poop on everybody except rich white men").

It pooped on them pretty well too. See pretty much precisely what @Apos described a bit back or the hypothetical western sheriff, re: leaders getting a lot of this piled on them. Firan was a pretty perfect example as they loved making players guess over the correct moral judgment (when, surprise: there's no right answer and they'd skewer you either way). I had to arbitrate racism (miscegenation, no less!), and class issues, with very vocal PCs on both sides of both issues and the staff controlled NPC mobs ready to lynch at the slightest misstep. Good times!

@seraphim73 Yeah, this one for me too. Not a game-breaker (since obv, D&D) but definitely a peeve... especially when newer systems throw it in or layer it unnecessarily on top of a system that could handle it another way (ie margin of success) and there's no history to justify it. People need to l2stats.

Breaking by replies up a bit some (oh and more stuff)

@Arkandel When I say lazy and corrupt are the options, I don't necessarily mean that every staffer at every one of these games is terrible everywhere, but that ultimately the persistent failure to make a different choice probably comes from one of these. It's either (intellectually) lazy, which is the 'its done in the source material and on every other game and I'm not going to think about alternatives' explanation, or its 'corrupt' in a broad sense that I take a hard line on all unequal chargen being in some sense corrupt.

It's not in any way difficult to do these things differently, it's just uncomfortable because it deviates from the 'everyone does it this way' familiarity and it takes away the ability to let your friends play pretty princesses/badass prince mcmanlypantses. You can give some high nobles better titles but equal or worse stuff, it's not at all difficult mechanically and its quite true to history, which is full of powerful 'Count' level nobles overthrowing Dukes and Kings.

@Kanye-Qwest Maybe that's true but it's not what I'm talking about? That's plot access or 'speshulness' quotient. I was having a very specific argument about the construction of noble hierarchies and the impact that has on feudal conflict. Arx's hierarchies are equivalent to Firan's, Star Crusade's, 5th World's, etc, and one of your staffers admits people are shy of conflict, so I think it still fits the mold.

@deadculture You know me and know I'm a fan of equitable CG in general.

FS's book rules vs say the implementation on SC kind of get at one of the big problems, that there's basically no way to 'fairly' (and math-ly) balance out the sweeping advantages a top-tier landed noble gets on a game in that style with CG points. Which is why I tend to suggest you just need flatter, more realistic feudalism. A higher title costing a marginal amount of extra CG points works if most domains are still roughly equivalent and all you're getting is a touch of prestige/IC clout/etc. It doesn't work if the higher titles come with an order of magnitude of IC benefits across every facet of the game.

@faraday said in [The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?]

It's completely attached. The sheets that you see on BSGU's web portal are pulled from the DB. When you edit your profile on the web, it updates the DB so those changes are reflected in the game too. The list of 'locations' you see is just a list of grid rooms. Having a tightly-integrated website/wiki and telnet game is what makes it cool.

Well, what I meant re: the grid is that while it's pulling the locations/descs from the rooms it looks like it has its own method of including people in the location/scene (and isn't mirroring people's grid locations), allows you just to change the location on the fly, etc. So at least in some sense, it's a parallel way of RPing, right?

I don't mean this as criticism I'm just getting a handle of what it does and how, and the location distinction is interesting because that's been one big thing separating MUs from a lot of other real-time chat based RP platforms.

Then there are some more subtle impacts. Let's say that you allow people to log in on the web side and submit bbposts or post to scenes. Should that person be reflected on the 'Who' list or the scene's room in-game? How? Let's say you allow a GM combat management screen on the web. How does it know when someone has updated their action in-game? How does it alert the GM to that fact so they don't accidentally overwrite someone's changes with their own?

This is what I was getting at above, I guess.

Anyway, I dunno, both of the responses to me stressed how complicated it is, as if I was trivializing that, which I didn't mean to be. I simply meant to offer that as we have a couple of projects doing both so it seems silly for the peanut gallery to be arguing about only having one or the other.

@packrat FWIW, it looks like you're repeating a lot of Paulus' design (and thus, mistakes).

First, no one is that interested in peasants with pitchforks. People want their toys (see many SC examples and how few people bought anything low-tech with discretionary money). So in your example, you're just making the game less fun for the Baroness, more fun for the guilder with his fancy tanks or spaceships.

Second, 'Elite, Training 3, Motorized Grenadiers' is already way past 'moderately' complicated. How many Training 1 Regulars is that worth? Do they beat or lose to Training 5 guys with no fancy stuff? Etc etc etc. I'm the kind of player willing to do spreadsheets or write a simulator to sort this stuff out, but I'm not most players.

Finally, 'if you're rich enough': How big of a gap can you really create here without recreating SC's Counts of Doom vs. Barons of meaninglessness? It seems like any scale where one dude can conceivably field full units in one of the rarest pieces of equipment in the game is going to have a pretty major haves and have-nots.

To end with something positive: the situation you describe at the end of your post seems like the ideal you want to push for, so maybe you should make that more inherent to the design. IE: everyone gets some appropriate troops and then one special thing. FS was never a game with all this civ stuff, it was all background to players running around with the really badass toys.

@thenomain To be clear, I'm not saying it's a doomed endeavor or anything. I just think we need to dig deep and realize we've basically built new games on the mangled corpses of their original incarnations. Repeating basic WoD-isms in every 'new' system is probably the quickest way to assure we have all the same problems, right?

To maybe give a productive example of the process, see FATE in the other thread. All my other likes or dislikes with aside, I think it borderline totally fails for MU because of Compels. They're critical to the TT working, but also really work best from a GM stance: I bribe you with points to make you accept difficult yet narratively intriguing consequences of pre-established fiction. They work poorly from an adversarial stance, where people would tactically pick untenable choices to drain you of FATE points.

Fixing them is tricky because they're tied to Aspects as a whole. As a 'FATE is tricky in general' person, I might suggest replacing free-form Aspects with an established list on your game, and giving them some more defined rules text that could be used for Compels. Kinda a hybrid of CoD conditions/tilts?

I DID A CONSTRUCTIVE THING.

@nemesis said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

The fact remains that a lot of people are asking for a single social roll to have the same impact on the opposition's intentions as a bullet would on their health. They've even suggested a separate health track for socials, just to make sure we all knew that's what they were talking about without any room for confusion or debate. That's what most of the pro-social stats folks want: A manipulation-machine-gun that never breaks or needs repair and maintenance or runs out of bullets, and ultimately a bullet hits your player's active decision-making ability and innate intentions as opposed to their desire to follow a course of action they've already decided on.

So... if you were familiar with anything about one of the systems being talked about for 'social health' (FATE), you'd realize it doesn't have to be this way at all.

Any conflict in FATE works the same way. People roll skills as attacks, stress is accrued (or absorbed via consequences, which are basically victim-controlled crits/lasting injuries/etc). When you run out of stress/consequences, you're taken out. At any point before that, however, you can concede the conflict. In this case, you lose, but you get to choose how: in combat, you're left for dead amidst the fallen, taken as a hostage to the supervillain's lair that you wanted to break into anyway, thrown off the waterfall, etc. In a social conflict, this easily covers 'flee the room in embarrassment' vs 'now we fuck.' You also get some fate points for conceding!

So basically the only situation where your agency is removed is when you, the player, are determined to keep fighting for a win no matter the cost. That alone is pretty much an ironclad buffer against any kind of abuse. There's no way for an aggressor to supersede your ability to lose gracefully on your own terms.

So while I still have my doubts about some FATE mechanics being suitable for MU usage, I will continue to point out that its stress system is brilliant and could be the great basis for a MU design. It's incredibly versatile: aside from social and physical combat, I've seen FATE variants use it for wealth systems, Vampire-worthy influence conflict, etc.